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How long does it take to build a nuclear reactor?

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  • Apr 3, 2023
  • #Nuclearpower
Hannah Ritchie
@HannahRitchie
(Author)
hannahritchie.substack.com
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“Nuclear takes too long to build” is one of the most common arguments against nuclear power. But does it really? How long does it take to build a nuclear reactor? That’s the questio... Show More

“Nuclear takes too long to build” is one of the most common arguments against nuclear power. But does it really? How long does it take to build a nuclear reactor? That’s the question I want to answer in this post.

To do this I dug into the data on the construction times of nuclear reactors across the world since the 1950s. I did this from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) PRIS database, supplemented with additional reactor data from Wikipedia (which has an impressively curated list of more than 600 reactors).

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Richard Jones @RichardALJones · Apr 3, 2023
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"Nuclear takes too long to build", say its opponents. Great post from @_HannahRitchie looking at the data. "The median time to build a nuclear reactor was 6.3 years", but there's a long tail. But some countries (like the UK) have just got worse at building anything.
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